by Bill Hussey
‘Jack? Are you still awake?’
‘No. Mum, don’t come in.’
‘I have to talk to you.’
‘I said NO. Leave me alone.’
‘Look, I know I’ve been …’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘It does,’ she whispered. ‘We have to talk. About them.’
‘For God’s sake, just leave me the fuck alone!’
‘I won’t. You have to listen …’
His mother opened the door.
‘Jesus in heaven.’
She stood in the doorway, her mouth open, her hand resting, almost casually, on the jamb. What was she thinking, Jack wondered. Was there a scrap of comfort she might take from the horror unfolding before her eyes? Something inside that said: if these are demons flowing forth from your child, then it follows that there must be a God.
‘Go. Get out,’ Jack screamed.
Gripping the edge of the bed, he spat up a mouthful of blood. It sat foaming on the surface of the pool. He watched his mother enter the room. Her voice trembled when she spoke:
‘Is this …?’
He nodded and wiped red streaked saliva from his mouth. He saw the terror working the muscles of her face. She began to mouth silent prayers.
‘Mum. Please, you have to go.’
‘No.’
She did not look at her son. Her concentration was focused entirely on the emerging shapes at his feet. She gave a sudden start as a spine lashed out from the ooze. The nodules of bones prattled across the floorboards. Other bodily components joined it, thrashing about in the mass, fighting to take form. It took only a few seconds for the assembly to be complete. The grind of bones, the snap of vertebrae, the screams of rebirth. The six, which he had not seen fully formed since the night they had entered him, staggered and slithered into being.
‘God, Holy Father, keep and protect us,’ she murmured. ‘Strike down your righteous anger on this abomination.’
The little huddle looked from Jack to his mother. A harsh chirrup interrupted her prayers. She saw them in their entirety and faltered.
‘In His name … Oh, God …’
She half-turned, her fingers reaching for the handle, when the door slammed shut.
For a moment, no-one moved. Not Jack nor his mother nor them. The hornbeam tree in the garden tapped the window with a bony finger. The floorboards groaned and settled. Mister Sandman hummed from downstairs. Jack thought of his father, asleep in the armchair, his fingers loose around the neck of a drained bottle. What dreams had the Sandman brought him? No nightmare to equal this.
‘Leave her alone …’
There was a smart click-click-click-click as insectile legs skittered around and six faces peered at him.
‘Mum, please go …’
‘I can’t.’
‘Go! They won’t hurt me …’
Hopelessly, she said: ‘The door. The door won’t open.’
Jack could have sworn that all six mouths smiled. Then, with moonlight on their backs, they scuttled towards her.
He watched his mother’s faith drain away. Her back pressed to the door, she stumbled over prayers and passages. All his life, she had told him that every day she felt the love and comfort of God. How cruel it was that, in these last moments, she should look so abandoned. She was abandoned. And not just by God. Jack wanted to move. To go to her. To save her. But he was afraid.
His mother’s crucifix fell from between her fingers. Paying the talisman no heed, they stepped over it and surrounded her. Claws caught at her dress and grazed her legs. An excited squeal rose from one of them.
‘What have you done, Jack?’ she murmured.
Her eyes never left his as the creatures slipped their hands beneath her nightdress.
‘Stop them.’
She pleaded. Pleaded for intervention, heavenly or human. None came.
‘Please, God, make him stop them.’
Jack tore at the bed sheets. There were fractions of seconds during which he thought he had the courage to move. Then fear would roll through him again, scraping bile from his stomach and washing it into his mouth.
One of the creatures gave a contended purr. Claire Trent’s head bucked forward. She began to shudder as she felt the first licks of pain between her legs. She stared wild-eyed at her son. Darkness deepened in that far corner of the room. It was as if the creatures were drawing shadows to them, cloaking the horror of their actions from uncomprehending eyes. Jack could no longer make out his mother. He could only hear her fevered breathing. Yet when she spoke, her voice came in a strange, sing-song tone.
‘Inside me … Oh, Jack. They’re inside me. Moving further and further inside …’
He heard it. The intimate sound of fingers reaching too deep. Soft and velvety, it prompted Jack to empty his stomach onto the floor. Over the dry heaving that followed, he heard his mother take a shocked intake of breath. Then came the report of something snapping, as of a high-tension wire being plucked in two. She did not scream. Not even when the tearing began. It became a frenzy, and Jack could only imagine the violence of it. Something broke, like a wishbone cracking between fingers. A wet, heavy splatter hit the floorboards. In the same moment, Jack wished the darkness away and prayed fervently that it would remain. Further sounds assailed him, each speaking of damage that could never be repaired.
‘No! Fucking get off her! Fucking get off her! You fucking…’ he screamed.
Below, he heard shattering glass and his father’s frightened voice. The record skipped back across the Mister Sandman lyrics.
‘Mum,’ he whispered.
From beyond the door came a clatter of feet up the stairs.
‘Jack? Open up! Jack! What’s going on? Is your mother in there?’
His dad hammered on the door.
Jack got to his feet. His legs shook as he moved through the room.
‘Mum?’
There was blood on the bare boards. Trails of it, as if she had tried to escape but had been dragged back into that dark corner. A broken fingernail, skin adhering, stuck out of a splinter of wood.
‘Mum?’
Silence. He stepped forward, into the shadows
His mother, her face laced with blood, was lying on the floor. She was not moving. Unidentifiable trophies sat in the crook of her legs. Beneath her skirt flowed a thin evacuation of clear fluid.
They were back in their composite form. The matter touched her feet and started moving up her body. She flinched; that was all. Jack watched and was thankful for the silence. The quiet working of the thing made it seem almost natural. Her legs and abdomen were soon filmed. The mass trickled in a single finger up her front, between her breasts and along her neck. When it touched her lips, she shivered. It fanned out behind her, capping her head like a bonnet.
‘Mum?’
‘Jack? Is that you?’ his father shouted. ‘Open the door! Has she hurt you, son?’
They wrapped themselves tight around her. A living winding sheet.
Jack knelt down beside her. There was nothing left. Only the vaguest of impressions beneath the casing. Nothing, except the brooch. The white cameo of the French lady she always wore at her breast. His frustration, his shame, his anger exploded. He would tear them off. He would rip them from her. He would save her. The moment he touched it, the fluid withdrew. It drained away from her face, unmasking dead eyes. Before his brain registered the ripple moving up his arm, one thought drowned all others: I let them kill her. He did not react as they flowed, triumphantly, back into his mind. He reached out and touched her face.
The door splintered open.
‘Jack? Jesus. Jack, stay here. Stay with your mother. I’m going to get help.’
Footfalls raced downstairs. He heard his father giving their address. Describing how he had found his wife.
‘No, she’s just … She looks dead … No, there’re no injuries I can see.’
Jack started. The blood had vanished from her face. The scarlet trails on the floo
rboards were gone.
‘Jack… you must fight them…’
Her lips moved, but her eyes remained fixed.
‘For the rest of your life… fight them. Find a way. Keep them from the world. Do you promise me?’
They were sleeping now. He felt them wound tight in their nook. As she continued to stare up at him, her cold, dead hand slipped into his.
‘Promise me. In His name.’
He nodded. He had no tears. Her hand went limp.
Thirty-seven
‘The thing with Trent is, not only is he a prissy little know-it-all, but you can bet he’s never had it tough. I guarantee mummy and daddy powdered his arsehole ’til he was thirty.’
Dave Fellowes looked up from his log book and smiled.
‘He’s really got you riled, ain’t he, Pat? This all still ’cos of Greylampton?’
Mescher banged his pint mug on the desk, spraying the log book with tea.
‘Hey, steady, Big Man,’ Fellowes complained.
‘Y’eard about what happened this morning, didn’t ya?’ Mescher spat. ‘Trent was found sleeping rough in a fucking college car park. I found out, took it straight up to Jarski. You know what that self-important dickhead said? He said he didn’t have to explain his personnel decisions to me.’
‘You’re breaking my heart here, Pat. You know what? You and Jack should go on Jerry Springer or somethin’. Get some relationship counselling.’
‘It’s fucked up, that’s all I’m saying. Trent’s not shown his face today and he’s still OIC. What?!’
A WPC had addressed Mescher as she descended into the holding area.
‘PC Dawling, Sir. Says he wants to see you.’
‘Can’t get any lower,’ Mescher grumbled. ‘I’m taking orders from uniform now.’
He trudged upstairs, his face level with the WPC’s buttocks. For the first time in weeks, Mescher felt his dick harden a little. Before they reached the security door, he groped inside his trousers and gave himself a quick squeeze.
Dawling waited in interview room six. There was a woman sitting on one of the plastic bucket seats, her head between her legs, vomit dried into her hair. Her clothes were cheap flash. Just a nigger tart, Mescher thought.
‘Fuck me,’ he muttered. ‘Can’t you uniform boys handle a prossie round-up no more?’
‘I don’t want him,’ the woman said, pointing at Mescher. ‘I told you who I want.’
‘She says she’s been drugged by a client, Sir,’ Dawling said.
‘And? What’s it got to do with me?’
‘Terri?’ Dawling said soothingly. ‘Can you tell DI Mescher who you asked for when we brought you in?’
‘How many times? I want pretty eyes. Dumb dick here won’t listen, I’ll tell you.’
She got to her feet. Swaying as she walked, she made for Mescher. Her multicoloured beads clacked as she prodded him in the chest.
‘I want scar eyes. Get scar eyes. He’ll stop them hurting me. They doped me up. They raped me. Nobody here gives a shit. Get my pretty eyes …’
Mescher guessed who she meant, of course. Excitement sang through him. This is it, he thought, I’ve got you, you piece of shit. The prostitute nodded and smiled at him. He gripped her arm and shook her. The WPC made a move as if to stop him, but the look he gave her stopped the bitch dead in her tracks.
‘Tell me who you want,’ he said.
The whore laughed. Mescher took a quick look at Dawling and WPC Tits. They were pussies. He could handle them. He hit the girl hard across the face.
‘Now,’ he grunted. ‘You gonna tell me?’
‘Sca-scar eyes,’ she gasped. ‘I saw him. On TV, talking …’bout that boy. I know him.’
‘And that’s the whole truth, so help me God,’ Jack concluded.
Time was called at the bar. Dawn drained her second vodka and lemonade. She felt Jack’s eyes upon her. She wondered what reaction he expected. How do you react to something so horribly absurd? She wanted to laugh, to cry, to scream, to reason with him, to hold him close, to run away and hide her son from this softly-spoken lunatic. She did none of these things. She went back to the beginning and tried to consider things logically.
After they left Jamie with her father, they had gone to the Four Feathers. It was a favourite haunt of off-duty coppers. Ringo, the landlord, opened up the function room in the back so that they could talk without fear of interruption. Dawn had listened without comment to Jack’s story. During the more fantastical episodes, she expected him to look away, but it was when describing those incidents – the accident, his mother’s ‘murder’, the creatures – that he held her eyes. Whatever the real story of his life, it was clear that this catalogue of insanity was the version he believed.
She looked around the function room. Her eyes moved from red felt wallpaper to the dull brasses, from framed lithographs of this quarter of the city a century ago to the humming jukebox.
Jack’s phone rang. He cancelled the call. She decided her tack:
‘What happened afterwards?’
‘She was buried … I knew my dad wondered sometimes, but he was too smart to see the truth. That I did kill her.’
‘You didn’t kill your mother, Jack.’
‘Well, let her die then. It was murder by omission.’
‘And these things. They’re still …’
‘In here,’ he tapped his temple. ‘I tried to keep my promise. Gradually, I gained some kind of control over them. They hated logic, so I used logic against them. I found that, having seen inside my mind once, I could impose a structure upon it. I think we all do that anyway, on a subconscious level. But mine was a conscious effort. I constructed a place for them. A prison that they would find it hard to escape from. Every day since then, I’ve fortified that prison. I’ve trained my mind. And I’ve kept myself alone.’
‘Your mother never said you had to live alone.’
‘She told me to fight them. This is the only way I know how. They draw energy from intimacy, affection, hatred, love … Touching. Emotion is so close to imagination, Dawn. There’s a symbiotic relationship between the two things. Imagination can shape emotion and emotion can fire imagination. Both weaken logic, and it’s only logic that keeps them locked away. That’s why I couldn’t …’
‘Then why did you even try? With me?’
‘They’d become so weak. I could barely sense them. For more than twenty years, I ground them down; for all I knew they were dead. And then my father passed away. He was the only one who loved me without needing to know the whole truth. For the first time, I really was alone … But there was you. And I thought that, one day, there might be a chance that I could explain it all to you. That first day we met, you remember? I touched you. I saw you. So kind, so loving. So afraid. I was drawn to you, to your compassion. I wanted to be happy, just once. It was selfish. I can never forgive myself for the risk I took. The danger I put you and Jamie in. But I thought they might be gone.’
‘But they weren’t. You felt them again?’
‘The first time we … I sensed them. The slightest flinch. I had to stop. To pull away from you. As the weeks passed, I began to convince myself that I had imagined it. Then, the night we tried again, the last night, they broke free and flooded back through my mind. It was all I could do to stop them reaching out. From hurting you.’
‘You think they’re evil.’
‘Of course they are. They killed my mother. They tore her …’
‘Your father didn’t see that. And they saved your life. On the Death Bank.’
‘They saved themselves. They were parasites protecting their host. If I died, they died.’
It was time to stop this.
‘They, Jack? They are not real. What did the doctors say your mother died of …?’
‘Embolism.’
‘And you were guilty? You saw it and you couldn’t help her. You know this is all make-believe, don’t you? You’ve skewed your memory. Changed your past. Your accident happened, but
you’ve worked these things into a retelling of it, to give them an origin story. A genesis. Those things are mental projections of your guilt. Nothing more.’
‘Spare me the pop psychology, Dawn. If I’d created these things to project my guilt onto, then why do I still feel guilty?’
‘Because guilt is a fluid emotion, and the story you’ve constructed to contain it is like a leaking paper bag. Jack, your mother died naturally. It wasn’t your fault.’
‘We don’t have time for you to be sceptical, Dawn. They’re back. I brought them back by trying to get close to you. In the long run, it may have been a blessing. Albeit in the best fucking disguise ever seen. The touching shows me things from a person’s past. With the dreaming, they paint the future. I had my first waking dream in years last Friday …’ he breathed hard. ‘Dawn, it showed me how Jamie is going to die.’
‘Don’t, Jack.’
‘Please. I have to tell you.’
She listened as he revealed what he claimed to have kept hidden for the last few days. In his dreams, he had seen a man murder her son. He told her that he had discovered that Simon’s body had been taken over by Peter Malahyde according to some arcane ritual. Oliver Godfrey and Stephen Lloyd had been murdered in order to complete a second ritual that would involve Jamie. Jack believed that Peter had tired of his son’s form and wanted a new one.
‘You have to believe it, Dawn.’
His phone rang.
‘Answer it,’ she said.
‘Jack Trent … Yes, hello … Calm down. Where are you? Stay there … I’m coming.’
He stared down at the phone, as if he mistrusted what he had just heard.
‘What is it? Jack?’
‘That was Doug Winters. He’s just seen Simon Malahyde.’
Thirty-eight
The Lazarus Club on Lexington Avenue was only three streets from the Four Feathers. It was a gaudy super-club, complete with neon lights, plastic Doric columns and a huge Medusa bust, sporting dramatically coiffured steel snakes. Doug Winters waited for them in the foyer. Joll, the six foot seven wall of hair that had let them into Doug’s house on Berwick Street, was holding him up.